Read a page a day via email with Dripread

Unless it's a page-turner I can't put down, it takes me months to get through a book. In addition to the usual parenting and job responsibilities that occupy my time I have other distractions that keep me from regularly opening a book, including but not limited to R.B.I. Baseball on my iPad, a pair of summer softball leagues, Cincinnati Reds games on the MLB.com At Bat app, The New Yorker, MTV's "The Challenge," pick-up basketball, "Fargo" on FX, and evening walks with the dog.

With Dripread, I'm not only reminded to continue to make progress on the book I'm reading, but I'm also given digestible installments each day right in my inbox.

Dripread does not require an account if you'd like to read one of the many titles it offers for free on its site. Just select a book from the collection, enter your email in the box in the upper-right corner, and click the button that reads "Start delivery of this book."

You'll then get an email confirming your email address and your book selection. After confirming your identity and intentions, you'll receive a second email outlining the scheduled delivery of your the book you selected and how many daily installments it will take. The first installment will arrive the following day, but if you are eager to jump right in, you can click the link in the introductory email to immediately send the next installment.

Each installment features the text of the book in the body of the email; there are no attachments to deal with. At the end of each installment is a large Done Reading link. You need to click this link to schedule delivery of the next installment for the following day, which will keep you from getting backed up with unread installments. And should you want to tackle more than one installment in a given day, when you click the Done Reading link, Dripread opens a new tab with that day's installment, below which is a button labeled "Dripread next installment" that will immediately email you the next chunk of text. Lastly, at the bottom of each email installment is a link to stop sending installments.

Although you don't need an account to use Dripread, if you sign up for one (it's free and requires only an email address) you can upload your own e-books -- as long as they are in the EPUB format -- and control your subscriptions from the My Books page on Dripread's site.

Dripread sends you what it calls a page a day with each installment, but what it calls a page is slightly longer than a page in a book. For example, E.M. Forster's "Where Angels Fear to Tread" is over 300 pages and takes 72 Dripread installments, while Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is well over 1,000 pages and takes 757 installments. So, if you try to read War and Peace at one installment per day, it'll take you more than two years. Sure, that may sound like a long time to spend on one book, but that'll have me finishing Tolstoy's tome roughly two years faster than my current pace.

Dripread also has an experimental feature that will do the same thing for long Web articles. Head to this Dripread page where you can enter a URL of a long article that the site will then break up into installments and email to you each day. I tried it with a few links and it worked without issue.